Middleboro Review 2: 05/23/22

Monday, May 23, 2022

Southern Baptists rocked by rampant sex abuse scandal

It's Our Democracy!

Today’s Action: Get out the vote in the primaries!

Pfizer says COVID vaccine more than 80% effective in kids under 5

Today's Top Stories:

Top Southern Baptists stonewalled clergy sex abuse victims for decades
Southern Baptist leaders silenced and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse for twenty years while seeking to protect their own reputations, according to a scathing new report.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Top Republican infuriates own party with stunning admission
Sen. Rick Scott went on TV once again to promote a GOP plan to raise taxes on tens of millions of middle- and lower-class Americans, claiming they don't have enough "skin in the game."

Take Action: Join progressive champion Jessica Cisneros in calling for Congress to support union protections for American workers!

Republicans pull VILE stunt over baby formula shortage
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Unreal.

Biden says US willing to respond "militarily" in event of Chinese attack on Taiwan
President BIden said Monday that the United States would intervene militarily if China attempts to take Taiwan by force, a warning that appeared to deviate from the deliberate ambiguity traditionally held by Washington.

Trump shares post suggesting "civil war"
Another thoughtful, measured observation from the nation's 45th president, who was only impeached twice — and only once for inciting a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol during his single term in office.

Take Action: Tell Merrick Garland: Indict Trump!

Kellyanne Conway skewers "shrewd and calculating" Jared Kushner in new memoir
Oh, schadenfreude!

Take Action: Arrest and prosecute Trump’s criminal allies now!

Arkansas governor distances himself from extreme abortion ban he willingly signed into law
Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson attempted to shirk responsibility on Sunday for signing a strict "trigger law" that would ban abortion in his state without any exceptions for rape and incest, insisting that Arkansas will revisit that matter if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Take Action: Demand big corporations stop funneling money to anti-choice politicians!

John Fetterman is our BEST chance to flip a Senate seat and protect our majority
Fetterman for PA: Can you chip in to support the most important Senate race in the country?

Top Senate Republican who voted to overturn 2020 election admits Biden won fairly
Florida's Rick Scott, one of eight Senate Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results, admitted on CBS' Face the Nation that Joe Biden is "absolutely" the lawfully elected president of the United States. Glad we could finally clear that up.

Baby formula CEO apologizes for shortage as the first overseas shipment arrives in the US
The CEO of Abbott, the company whose voluntary recall of several widely sold baby formula brands helped trigger a nationwide formula shortage, has apologized for the crisis, as the first overseas shipment of formula approved by President Biden arrived in the US on Sunday.

A new billionaire was minted every 30 hours during the pandemic as income inequality surge continues
The COVID-19 pandemic is "set to drive the biggest systemic increase in income inequality ever seen," Oxfam said in a damning new report.

Good grief

Texas woman sought in fatal shooting of professional cyclist

Man shot and killed on NYC subway in latest ‘unprovoked’ attack

Wisconsin couple stave off bear attack in their home

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

Number of displaced people passes staggering 100 million milestone

Mysterious liver illness in children perplexing world health officials

Russian sentenced to life in Ukraine’s 1st war crimes trial

Flooding in India, Bangladesh leaves millions homeless, kills 60

Iran Revolutionary Guard colonel slain in Tehran

UN agency condemns 'homophobic and racist' monkeypox reporting

Hope...

Asteroid the size of a small island to fly past Earth this Friday

California floats supervised sites for 'safe injections' to combat overdoses

New program seeks to break the cycle between jail and homelessness

Engineering students create edible tape to keep burritos secure

Today’s Action: Get out the vote in the primaries!

Tomorrow, four states have primary elections — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas. We all know the biggest enemies of progress in America are Republicans, but it’s also been painfully clear that just a few bad Democrats can muck a LOT of things up for all of us. This is our chance to do something about it — to not just elect any Democrats, but to reshape the party with real progressives to advance our legislative priorities!

If you live in one of the four states voting tomorrow and don’t yet have a plan to vote, make yours now. If you have friends in those states, call them and cajole them to the polls! Find out when your own state’s primaries will be held, and identify your current polling place here. It is absolutely critical to show up this year — and every year — to build a truly progressive future.

Every. Vote. Matters. Check your voter registration status and polling place to ensure you’re prepared for upcoming primaries and the midterms — and tell your network of like-minded friends and family to do the same on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, at the park, in the bleachers, in the pews, at the dinner table, and anywhere else you can!

Tomorrow, progressive champion and immigration lawyer Jessica Cisneros is running to unseat one of the most conservative roadblocks in the Democratic party, anti-choice Rep. Henry Cuellar. Cuellar won his last primary battle against Cisneros by a mere 2,000 votes; this race is absolutely winnable, and we must rally to make it a reality.

The Cisneros campaign needs all hands on deck to get out the vote in Texas’ 28th district! Join a virtual phonebank event this evening and/or tomorrow and talk to voters in TX-28 about Cisneros’ vision for victory — if you can spare just two hours, your service could be the difference!

Every meaningful electoral victory shares a common thread: progressives turning out in full force on Election Day. Check your voter registration status at odaction.com/vote and make sure you’re ready to do your part in upcoming primaries and the midterms to win Congress and more.

PS — Please don't forget to sign the petition demanding Rep. Jim Jordan resign over serial sexual abuse coverup, and be sure to follow OD Action on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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re: Tuesday

We have just hours to go until polls open on primary day in Georgia:

We have to harness this moment to show the strength of our supporters and our campaign. can you make your next donation before polls open and make sure we have the resources to hit the ground running for the general election?

The good news: our team has seen a surge of momentum in the last few days. Thanks to supporters like you, we’ve significantly closed the fundraising gap between us and Brian Kemp.

The bad news: Kemp raised millions in a committee he gave himself early, exclusive access to that's ready to spend attacking us right after the primary. He’s already using his power to rig the rules to his advantage.

That’s why we have to do everything we can to make sure we are in as strong a position as possible before Tuesday's primary. To do that we’re relying on a real advantage that our opponents don’t have — supporters like you, uniting for One Georgia.

We’re asking one more time — can you chip in right now? Your $5, $10, or even $15 contribution will make a big difference.

Thanks,

Stacey Abrams HQ

PAID FOR BY ABRAMS FOR GOVERNOR

Abrams for Governor
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Ste A102 #363
Atlanta, GA 30308
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Contributions to Abrams for Governor are not tax deductible.

outraised and outspent right before the primary

I have a few urgent updates I need to share with you:

1. NBC News reports that Georgia is "the most important swing state" in the November elections, which means Senate control could be decided by our race.

2. Republicans have funneled nearly $15 million into my potential GOP opponent Herschel Walker's campaign to defeat me – and he just launched a new TV ad to turn Georgia red.

3. Our people-powered movement is falling short of the resources we need to fight back. If we don't see an immediate surge of grassroots support, we could be outraised and outspent right before our critical primary election.

Everything we've been fighting for – from voting rights to affordable health care – is on the line in Georgia. With recent polls showing me 1 POINT BEHIND Walker – and the first votes in this race already being cast – we can't afford to miss a single fundraising goal. So I'm counting on you to help us close our budget gap now:

Please, will you give $5 or more right now – as much as you can spare before midnight – so we can pull ahead, win in Georgia, and keep the Senate blue?

I appreciate you – thank you.

– Rev. Raphael Warnock

Please read on for a personal message from Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock: thank you. I’m grateful to have grassroots folks like you standing alongside me in our critical fights for justice. Our midterm elections are taking place this November, and I need your help.

With Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate, Republicans have to flip just one seat to retake control – and experts say that I’m the most vulnerable Democratic senator up for reelection. Mitch McConnell and his GOP allies are flooding Georgia with millions to defeat me, and GOP super PACs are smearing me with attack ads. We need to fight back now – but I don't take a dime from corporate PACs, so I'm fully relying on your grassroots support to power this campaign to victory.

If you’re with me in this fight, please donate now to win in Georgia and defend our Democratic Senate majority. If you’d like to become one of my TOP supporters and receive exclusive updates from our campaign team, text “GEORGIA” to 52005.

Thank you!
– Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock

Text GEORGIA to 52005 • Visit our Team Warnock Store

Warnock for Georgia
PO Box 52227
Atlanta, GA 30355
United States

Nancy Pelosi doubles down on Henry Cuellar

BREAKING NEWS:
☎️NANCY PELOSI RECORDED A NEW ROBOCALL FOR HENRY CUELLAR ☎️

Help Jessica Cisneros and JD fight back >> Donate before Tuesday’s election.

Nancy Pelosi is going all in. Doesn’t matter if Roe v. Wade is about to fall. Doesn’t matter that Henry Cuellar is the last anti-choice Democrat in the House. She just made a last minute robocall to South Texas voters to whip votes for Henry Cuellar in Tuesday’s run off election. Now thousands of voters are hearing it across the district. We’re fighting back with our own paid communications, but we need your help to get the message out to more voters.

Will you rush a final donation to Jessica Cisneros and JD’s efforts to turn out the vote for Jess and defeat Cuellar on Tuesday? In a close election, just a few dollars here or there could be the difference between victory and defeat.

The political establishment is scared. Nancy Pelosi and all the party insiders are pulling out all the stops to prevent Jessica’s grassroots campaign from winning this major upset. But, if we get enough grassroots funding in the door before Tuesday, we have a very good chance to win this race.

Please make one more $10 donation to Jessica and JD for the final stretch ahead.

Thank you,

Team JD

Do not worry if you cannot afford to make a contribution — we understand that this is a difficult time. If you’re struggling, you can find a food bank here. We appreciate everything you do to keep our movement strong.

Please stay informed and follow the most up-to-date recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and your state public health department.

Donate

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Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
JusticeDemocrats.com
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Email us: us@justicedemocrats.com

Senator Elizabeth Warren Lauds the New York Stock Exchange for Investor Protections. It’s Currently Trading Multiple Alleged Frauds.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren Lauds the New York Stock Exchange for Investor Protections. It’s Currently Trading Multiple Alleged Frauds.

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2022 ~

Senator Elizabeth Warren

Yesterday the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing to consider President Biden’s nominations for two Commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission (Jaime E. Lizárraga and Mark Toshiro Uyeda) as well as Michael Barr to be Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. (For the skinny on Barr’s fitness to supervise megabanks on Wall Street, see our hold-your-nose report here and David Dayen’s eyepopping report here.)

During the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren noted the vast amounts of money that investors have lost in crypto coins and cryptocurrency and then moved on to compare the lack of protections that investors have in crypto versus the protections afforded in the stock market. Warren asked Barr the following:

Warren: “If I bought a company’s stock, even the most hyped-up, junkiest one listed on the New York Stock Exchange, could I be reasonably confident that the company is following basic rules that protect against fraud, insider trading and sloppy cyber security protocols?”

Barr: “Thank you Senator Warren. The area of jurisdiction is obviously within the expertise of the SEC but I think that is a reasonable basis for concluding that.”

Senator Warren is one of the most knowledgeable members of the full Senate and the Banking Committee when it comes to Wall Street. If Senator Warren doesn’t know that the New York Stock Exchange has morphed into a snake pit of shady stock deals where investors should have zero confidence in being protected, then there is a really big problem in Congress.

Before we get into present-day conditions at the New York Stock Exchange, it would be well to remember that Enron traded on the New York Stock Exchange while its executives and its auditor, Arthur Andersen, were setting up off-balance-sheet vehicles to hide the true state of its finances. It was considered the seventh largest corporation in the U.S. before it collapsed.

A stock trading currently on the New York Stock Exchange is Gaotu Techedu, previously called GSX Techedu. It trades under the ticker GOTU. On May 18, 2020, short seller Muddy Waters released a 25-page detailed report on the company, concluding as follows:

“We are short GSX because we conclude that it is a near-total fraud.

“We conclude that at least ~70% of its users are fake, and we think it’s quite likely that at least ~80% of its users are fake.”

The company denied that it was operating a fraud. News outlet SupChina reported on March 2 of last year this assessment of GSX Techedu:

“SupChina reviewed interviews with current GSX employees conducted by StrandPoint, a private investment firm. There was one consistent theme: the company was inflating its metrics across a variety of different business operations. One employee outlined a process by which tutors were made to concoct fake parents to present a livelier discussion on WeChat groups. Another employee admitted that online sales sagged last year relative to their competitors, despite the record-breaking top-line numbers presented in their financial reports. One top tutor was especially curt: ‘99% of tutor resumes are fake,’ he said.”

As the chart below shows, people who invested in GSX Techedu/Gaotu Techedu last year have lost almost all of their money. (It is trading this morning at $1.45 on the New York Stock Exchange.)

On April 15 of last year, the hedge fund Scorpion Capital, which has a short position in shares of QuantumScape and stands to profit from its decline, released a breathtaking 188-page report in which it calls QuantumScape a “fraud,” a “scam,” an “impending pump and dump,” and wrote that it “Makes Theranos Look Like Amateurs.” (Theranos claimed it had created a technology that would revolutionize the blood-testing industry. It was eventually exposed as a fraud. Former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou wrote the seminal book on the case, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.)

QuantumScape is a much-hyped battery developer for electric vehicles. It began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on November 27, 2020. At the time, it had no commercial product and zero revenues. The report from Scorpion Capital sums up its analysis of the company like this:

“The company claims to have a ‘magic material’ that’s led to a breakthrough solid-state battery for electric vehicles. Even amidst the current mania of retail gambling on vaporous SPAC promotions, QS stands out for its reckless, nosebleed valuation of $15B – or roughly ~ $80MM per employee, a mere 188 per LinkedIn. QuantumScape, across its investor materials, has only released about 7 key ‘data’ slides with a few scraps of information. This leads us to pen a new valuation metric – ‘Market Cap per Powerpoint Slide’ – in this case, about $2B for each tantalizing crumb.”

In a Twitter post, the company responded to the allegations, stating that it “stands by its data, which speaks for itself. We have provided higher transparency than any other solid-state battery effort we are aware of, with details on current density, temp, cycle life, cathode thickness, depth of discharge, cell area, pressure.”

In March of 2021, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley acted as joint lead book-running managers for an offering of 10.4 million shares of QuantumScape’s Class A common stock for $40 a share. (The stock is trading this morning at $12.66.)

Another problem stock is Chinese vaping company, RLX Technology, an IPO that had its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, January 22 of last year. Its IPO price was $12 per share.

The prospectus for its IPO is Orwellian in terms of the panoply of risks cited to its future business prospects, including this:

“We have identified a material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting.”

Exactly what is that material weakness? The prospectus tells us this:

“The material weakness identified relates to lack of sufficient competent financial reporting and accounting personnel with appropriate understanding of U.S. GAAP to design and implement formal period-end financial reporting controls and procedures to address complex U.S. GAAP technical accounting issues, and to prepare and review the consolidated financial statements and related disclosures in accordance with U.S. GAAP and financial reporting requirements set forth by the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC.”

Nonetheless, the New York Stock Exchange listed this company. On its second day of trading, its shares traded at an intraday high of $35, making those who sold at that point a very handsome profit. Yesterday, the shares closed at $1.98 following a year-long slump.

We could go on and on and on but you get the picture.

Dodgy listing standards are not the only problem at the New York Stock Exchange. Bestselling author and Wall Street veteran, Michael Lewis, revealed in his 2014 book, Flash Boys, how the exchange was allowing high frequency traders to co-locate their computers next to the main computers of the exchange to gain a speed advantage over other customers at a monthly cost that only the very rich can afford to pay.

Lewis writes in “Flash Boys” that “both Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange announced that they had widened the pipe that carried information between the HFT [high frequency trading] computers and each exchange’s matching engine. The price for the new pipe was $40,000 a month, up from the $25,000 a month the HFT firms had been paying for the old, smaller pipe.”

Instead of the SEC reining in these outrageous abuses, the norm has become a revolving door. Lewis writes in “Flash Boys” that the Royal Bank of Canada conducted a study in which they “found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington on their behalf.”

President Donald Trump’s SEC Chair, Jay Clayton, had legally represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks in the three years prior to taking the top post at the SEC. President Obama’s SEC Chair, Mary Jo White, had likewise been outside counsel to Wall Street’s largest firms.

Until millions of Americans actively engage in cleaning up the cesspool of corporate campaign financing and revolving doors, the integrity of the U.S. financial system will continue to erode dramatically.

LINK

Fed Chair Powell Says “Markets Are Orderly” and “Functioning.” They’re Not.

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Fed Chair Powell Says “Markets Are Orderly” and “Functioning.” They’re Not.

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2022 ~

This past Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sat for an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Nick Timiraos as part of the newspaper’s “Future of Everything Festival.” During that interview, Powell told Timiraos that U.S. markets “are orderly, they’re functioning.” The precise exchange went as follows: (Watch it at 24:38 on YouTube video here.)

Timiraos: “A Number of people have suggested to me the one thing that might slow you down or at least make this much more difficult would be some kind of market cataclysm. I wonder, in part, if that is why you are trying to be more transparent, not erratic, making sudden moves on your policy moves. My question there is, where’s your level of concern that financial stability and controlling inflation by raising interest rates, maybe a lot, might be fundamentally incompatible in that raising rates causes financial disruption, but doesn’t actually bring inflation under control? Where is your level of concern around that situation?”

Powell: “I don’t see that happening. We monitor a very broad range of financial conditions, and we’re doing that now, we’ll keep doing that. Different cycles look different. Sometimes the tightening takes place in one market, sometimes in another, sometimes in credit spreads, sometimes in all of them. So we’re watching them all as a group. Volatility has been up a little bit, that has some effect on liquidity in some markets. Nonetheless, the markets are orderly, they’re functioning. I think they’re processing the way we’re thinking – the way the FOMC is thinking about policy – pretty well. And I think the idea, again, is to have financial conditions tighten to the point where growth will moderate but still be positive, but moderate to the point where supply and demand can get back in alignment, and where we can get inflation back down to two percent. I see that broadly working pretty well right now. Obviously, there are some volatile days in volatile markets. But, so far, I see us getting through this fairly well.”

Powell has a law degree, not an economics degree. Thus, his misdiagnosis that inflation would be transitory already makes his judgement suspect. To now suggest that the stock market is “orderly” and “functioning” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary makes Powell look completely out-of-touch with reality.

Yesterday, the giant retailer, Target, lost 25 percent of its market value. In one trading session. That amounts to a $24.9 billion loss to shareholders. That’s not an orderly market. It’s also not normal.

On May 9, Jefferies tech analyst Brent Thill appeared on CNBC and said this about his tech trading desk:

“This has taken on more negativity than we could have imagined. We have no buyers on our desk. There’s max pain and it’s darker than I’ve seen in the last decade in covering many of these names.”

A little later in the interview, Thill added this: “I can tell you with high conviction that the biggest names on Wall Street right now are sitting out this and waiting…there’s a massive buyers’ strike right now.”

Memo to Fed Chair Powell: If you have only sellers and no buyers, you do not have an orderly market.

Crypto assets, which have been widely called a pyramid scheme based on the Greater Fool theory but were nonetheless allowed to spread throughout U.S. markets, had climbed to a market value of $2.9 trillion last November. That’s now a $1.4 trillion market cap with $1.5 trillion of investors’ money going poof in six months. That’s certainly not an orderly market.

Last week we reported that Senator Catherine Cortez Masto told Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at a hearing that the crypto market “is now larger than the subprime mortgage market which triggered the global financial crisis.”

Then there is the fact that, similar to the dot.com bust, Wall Street has been allowed by its regulators to bring dodgy companies to the public markets via a broken IPO due diligence system. Above is a chart of what 11 IPOs have done since being brought to the public markets last year. Ticker RLX stands for RLX Technology, a Chinese vaping firm that went public on the New York Stock Exchange on January 22, 2021 at $12 per share. It closed its first day of trading at $29.51, more than double its offering price – making a lot of people very rich. Yesterday, it closed at $1.94, a decline of 84 percent from its IPO price. These kinds of losses in newly minted IPOs are not normal – unless one views the rigged research and fraudulent hyping of the dot.com era normal.

Then there were the unprecedented surges followed by plunges in the stocks secretly held by the Archegos Capital Management family office hedge fund last year. (See graph below.) Some of the largest megabanks on Wall Street, which have federal bank examiners on their premises to prevent this sort of thing, were secretly making margin loans with as little as 15 percent equity to 85 percent leverage on massively concentrated positions in single stock names via tricked-up derivatives called Total Return Swaps. Archegos imploded in March of last year, leaving losses of more than $10 billion (that the public knows about) at a handful of megabanks.

Under the Fed’s Regulation T, stock investing on margin requires putting down at least 50 percent of the value of a stock initially and borrowing no more than 50 percent. What happened with Archegos is not an orderly market; it’s not normal; and the fact that none of the banks were charged with violating Reg T or aiding and abetting the manipulation of the market is further proof that something is seriously wrong with the U.S. Department of Justice and seriously wrong with bank examinations by the Fed.

And, finally, the charts we published earlier this month showing weeks of plunges and then spikes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average during morning trading are further evidence that markets are not orderly and are being manipulated.

The American people can choose to believe their own eyes or they can choose to believe a man who built his wealth working for a vulture capital firm. (If you think we’re being too harsh on Powell, you may want to consider that former Harvard Law professor and one of the most knowledgeable members of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren, has called Powell “a dangerous man” and voted against his confirmation for a second term as Fed Chair.)